Perseid Meteor Shower This Week-End

August 11, 2017

Get out of the city and prepare yourself for what is coming this week-end

We will experience, like every year, perseid meteor shower. Perseids can be observed every year on their maximum potential in a short period between 9 and 13 august.

Usually we can see about 80 meteors per hour, but last year the maximum was 200, which is incredible.

Perseids are leftovers from Swift-Tuttle’s queue that intersects each year with the Earth’s orbit, giving birth to a spectacular rain of falling stars.

Comet Swift-Tuttle is the largest object known to repeatedly pass by Earth; its nucleus is about 16 miles (26 kilometers) wide. It last passed nearby Earth during its orbit around the sun in 1992, and the next time will be in 2126. But it won’t be forgotten in the meantime, because Earth passes through the dust and debris it leaves behind every year, creating the annual Perseid meteor shower. – Space.com

The 2017 Perseid meteor shower will peak around 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT) on Aug. 12, so the nights of Aug. 11-12 and Aug. 12-13 should see the highest rates. The meteors appear to radiate out of the constellation Perseus, from which they take their name. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

When entering into the Earth’s atmosphere with a 37 miles (59 km) per second speed, meteors light up and create a beautiful view.

In order to observe this phenomenon, you must be in a dark place without being obstructed by light. It will take about 30 minutes for our eyes to adapt to the darkness.

The meteor shower’s actual peak is around 1 p.m. EDT Aug. 12, which means that the night before and the night after will both have good rates; The show would be slightly better in the predawn hours of Aug. 12, but that there’d be a decent show both nights. – Bill Cooke, NASA meteor expert.

Perseids do not pose any danger to our planet, most fragments being the size of a grain of sand.